The Patriarchal Pity Party: MRA Trolls and their list of "Misandrist" quotes

The world of misogynist men's rights activist online trolls isn't as huge as one might think. The question posed to Yahoo Answers below is made by a guy named Nifty. He is the Yahoo friend of Doodlebugjim in his current incarnation. If you don't recall who Doodlebugjim is from a previous post (a mention in comments, actually), I'll update you below. And then we'll move right along to Nifty's question and a rebuttal response. The point here is to show how this trolling works, and what to look for, and that placing a reply like the one offered below, wherever you see that tired old list of "misandrist" quotes may, over time, demonstrate how small and easily challenged and rebutted these trolly woman-haters' posts are.

Sadly, or pathetically, Yahoo Answers considers him to be a "Top Contributor". According to Yahoo Answers, "a Top Contributor is someone who is knowledgeable in a particular category." The category he is considered to be knowledgeable about is: "Gender & Women's Studies". I would maintain he is likely more knowledgeable about life forms on the other side of our galaxy than he is about women and feminism. You can read Doodlebugjim's answer to the question about feminism, *here* or below.

When asked by some guy "why aren't feminists offended by The Vagina Monologues?" Doodlebugjim responds:
"I have no idea why feminists accept this sort of sick and weird junk as entertainment."

Maybe it's just me, but I don't consider that a very knowledgeable response.

Curiously, he is listed as female, here at bebo.com. Anyone who wants to learn more about him can start with this google page. And this dude isn't trans or intersex, believe me. He shows about as much sensitivity to issues of gender variance as he does toward feminism.

Meanwhile, his pal Nifty wants to know at Yahoo Answers:

WOMEN? what do u say about these feminist quotes?

[Note: what follows are the same old batch of misquotes, quotes from fiction work not indentified as such, very selective quoting out of context, a few choice and astute observations about male supremacist men who deserve it, and misspellings of feminists' names. This list, or variations or parts of it, is being passed around and around online. Scroll through it if you wish, for the rebuttal. Or see what it is that convinces stupid male readers that women hate men, and that feminists are "misandrists". I'll try never to write that term outside of quotation marks again, as it must always be said in a sarcastic tone of voice, or typing in a sarcastic way of writing. Ironically, this list begins with someone who is not at all feminist.]

‘If you want to get something said in the politics tell a man. If you want to get something done in the politics tell a woman’ -- Margaret Thacher

"Feminism is built on believing women's accounts of sexual use and abuse by men." -- Catharine MacKinnon

"All sex, even consensual sex between a married couple, is an act of violence perpetrated against a woman." Catherine MacKinnon

"All men are rapists and that's all they are" -- Marilyn French Author, "The Women's Room" (quoted again in People Magazine) "All men are rapists and that's all they are ..." --Feminist Marilyn French, People Magazine (Percent of reported rape or near-rape incidents = .07% [The FBI's Uniform Crime Report lists for the year 1996])

"[Rape] is nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which ALL MEN KEEP ALL WOMEN IN A STATE OF FEAR" [emphasis added] -- Susan Brownmiller (Against Our Will p. 6)

"Marriage as an institution developed from rape as a practice. Rape, originally defined as abduction, became marriage by capture. Marriage meant the taking was to extend in time, to be not only use of but possession of, or ownership." -- Andrea Dworkin.

"Romance is rape embellished with meaningful looks." Andrea Dworkin in the Philadelphia Inquirer, May 21, 1995..

"Under patriarchy, no woman is safe to live her life, or to love, or to mother children. Under patriarchy, every woman is a victim, past, present, and future. Under patriarchy, every woman's daughter is a victim, past, present, and future. Under patriarchy, every woman's son is her potential betrayer and also the inevitable rapist or exploiter of another woman," Andrea Dworkin, Liberty, p.58..

"One can know everything and still be unable to accept the fact that sex and murder are fused in the male consciousness, so that the one without the imminent possibly of the other is unthinkable and impossible." Andrea Dworkin, Letters from a War Zone, p. 21..

"In every century, there are a handful of writers who help the human race to evolve. Andrea is one of them."--Gloria Steinem

"And if the professional rapist is to be separated from the average dominant heterosexual [male], it may be mainly a quantitative difference." -- Susan Griffin "Rape: The All-American Crime"
(p. 86)

"When a woman reaches orgasm with a man she is only collaborating with the patriarchal system, eroticizing her own oppression..." -- Sheila Jeffreys

"I claim that rape exists any time sexual intercourse occurs when it has not been initiated by the woman, out of her own genuine affection and desire." -- Robin Morgan, "Theory and Practice: Pornography and Rape" in "Going to Far," 1974.

"Who cares how men feel or what they do or whether they suffer? They have had over 2000 years to dominate and made a complete hash of it. Now it is our turn. My only comment to men is, if you don't like it, bad luck - and if you get in my way I'll run you down." -- Letter to the Editor: "Women's Turn to Dominate" -- Signed: Liberated Women, Boronia -- Herald-Sun, Melbourne, Australia - 9 February 1996

Toward a Feminist Theory of the State. Catharine A. MacKinnon, 1989, First Harvard University Press (paperback in 1991) [a legal treatise comparing and contrasting feminism with COMMUNISM AND SOCIALISM]

"It is not only men convicted of rape who believe that the only thing they did that was different from what men do all the time is get caught."

"If sexuality is central to women's definition and forced sex is central to sexuality, rape is indigenous, not exceptional, to women's social condition."

"Under law, rape is a sex crime that is not regarded as a crime when it looks like sex. The law, speaking generally, defines rape as intercourse with force or coercion and without consent., Like sexuality under male supremacy, this definition assumes the sadomasochistic definition of sex: intercourse with force or coercion can be or become consensual."

"Compare victims' reports of rape with women's reports of sex. They look a lot alike....[T]he major distinction between intercourse (normal) and rape (abnormal) is that the normal happens so often that one cannot get anyone to see anything wrong with it." Catherine MacKinnon, quoted in Christina Hoff Sommers, "Hard-Line Feminists Guilty of Ms.-Representation," Wall Street Journal, November 7, 1991.

"In a patriarchal society all heterosexual intercourse is rape because women, as a gr

[Nifty's posted question was cut off at the original site.]

A Reply to Nifty (and to doodlebugjimv12, who is never far behind or ahead of him)

The men who are posting and reposting, copying and pasting the above list or similar lists of quotes from feminists don't go so far as to let us know which of the quotes are fiction and which are not and which are taken out of context and which are not. The men who post this list all over the place also don't know how to spell feminists' names, which shows a glaring level of intellectual laziness on their part.

The list above also demonstrates that the men who copy and paste it are comfortable with a willful level of ignorance on the whole matter of what feminism is (many things) and what feminists seek to accomplish (achieving full human rights and civil rights for women, and much more as well, as most womanists and feminists I know don't have one political aim, but rather a cluster of concerns that warrant different approaches and forms of resistance at different times). There is so much wrong with this list being passed around by men who hate women and men who especially hate feminists that it's difficult to know where to begin. But begin I will. First, there are many quotes that questioners such as Nifty or doodlebugjim (v1 through v12), could collect and present for review and discussion. Here are some of the quotes that antifeminist men don't want you to see, because it will spoil their patriarchal pity party:

"The strongest lesson I can teach my son is the same lesson I teach my daughter: how to be who he wishes to be for himself." -- radical feminist Audre Lorde

"People can find eroticism in relations with people whom they respect and whom they see as equals." -- radical feminist Catharine MacKinnon

One of the most quoted lines by Marilyn French is one from her novel, The Women's Room. It reads, "all men are rapists, and that's all they are. They rape us with their eyes, their laws and their codes."

What is next was quoted from her in 2007 and is NOT from her fictional characters:

"Most men are on our side. They like their lives better than their fathers' lives. They like being involved with their children. They like having a better relationship with their women." -- radical feminist Marilyn French

"I believe that all human beings are equal. I believe that no one has the right to authority over anyone else." -- radical feminist Marilyn French

"For me, forgiveness and compassion are always linked: how do we hold people accountable for wrongdoing and yet at the same time remain in touch with their humanity enough to believe in their capacity to be transformed?" -- radical feminist bell hooks

"No one deserves brutality because of what they are, there condition of birth." -- radical feminist Andrea Dworkin

"Truth is harder to bear than ignorance, and so ignorance is valued more--also because the status quo depends on it; but love depends on self-knowledge and self-knowledge depends on being able to bear the truth." -- radical feminist Andrea Dworkin

"As all advocates of feminist politics know most people do not understand sexism or if they do they think it is not a problem. Masses of people think that feminism is always and only about women seeking to be equal to men. And a huge majority of these folks think feminism is anti-male. Their misunderstanding of feminist politics reflects the reality that most folks learn about feminism from patriarchal mass media." -- radical feminist bell hooks

There are easily one thousand times that many quotes by men saying vehemently disgusting and vile, violent, and completely disrespectful things about "all women". Why don't these MRAs quote from those works of fiction and state the views of misogynist men? Because that wouldn't make this pack of distortions work out so well for their biased agenda.

Let's visit a few of the quotes by men, throughout history. These are just a tiny sampling demonstrating that men's hatred of women is centuries old and exists across many societies. I will post the source of these quotes later in this response. And keep in mind, these men occupied positions of significant political leadership and social influence with actual power to control institutions and societies that radical feminists, as yet, have never had.

In Hesiod’s words...
‘From her comes all the race of womankind
The deadly female race and tribe of wives
Who live with mortal men and do them harm.’

Tertullion, one of the founding fathers of the Catholic Church, famously harangued the archetypal feminine thus...
‘And do you know that you are Eve? God’s sentence hangs over all your sex and His punishment weighs down upon you. You are the devil’s gateway, it was you who first violated the forbidden tree and broke God’s law. You coaxed your way around man whom the devil had not the force to attack. With what ease you shattered that image of God: man!’

‘Woman is a stupid vessel over whom man must always hold power, for the man is higher and better than she is.’ Martin Luther, Protestant Reformationist. (NOT Martin Luther King!)

‘A man with a hundred tongues who lived for a century would still not be able to complete the task of describing the vices and defects of a woman.’ Mahabharata, Hindu.

Georg Hegel, wrote in his ‘Philosophy of Right’...
‘Women are certainly capable of learning, but they are not made for the higher forms of science, such as philosophy...Women acquire learning – we know not how – almost as if by breathing ideas, more by living really than by actually taking hold of knowledge.’

Friedrich Nietzsche said that...
‘When a woman inclines to learning, there is usually something wrong with her sex apparatus.’

And it lurches into the twentieth century with the words of Otto Weininger on the absolute nothingness of women...

‘Women have no existence and no essence, they are not, they are nothing, Mankind occurs as male or female, as something or nothing...the meaning of woman is to be meaningless. She represents negation, the opposite pole from the Godhead, the other possibility of humanity....A woman cannot grasp that one must act from principle; as she has no continuity she does not experience the necessity for logical support of her mental processes...she may be regarded as ‘logically insane’. From ‘Sex and Character’, 1906.

Dr. Max Baff, Professor of Psychology, in 1910:
‘All women are fundamentally savage, and the suffragist movement is simply an outbreak of emotional insanity.’

‘Women who say no do not always mean no. It is not just a question of saying no, it is a question of how she says it, how she shows and makes it clear. If she doesn’t want it she only has to keep her legs shut and she would not get it without force.’ Judge David Wild, 1982.

And here's another bit of "brilliance" by Martin Luther:
‘Men have broad shoulders and narrow hips, and accordingly they possess intelligence. Women have narrow shoulders and broad hips. Women ought to stay at home; the way they were created indicates this, for they have broad hips and a wide fundament to sit upon, keep house and bed and raise children.’

‘The chief distinction in the intellectual powers of the two sexes is shown by man attaining to a higher eminence, in whatever he takes up, than woman can attain – whether requiring deep thought, reason, or imagination, or merely the use of senses and hands...’ Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man.

I haven't even tapped the vast body of "great" literature, exposing all the quotes from such famous misogynists as Norman Mailer and Ernest Hemingway. I haven't even shown images of woman-hating mass produced by men like Larry Flynt of Hustler and Bob Guccione of Penthouse. I haven't gone near all the rapes women offline that men film and put online for men's entertainment. I haven't begun to quote what all those men have to say about women and especially feminists that is disgustingly pro-rape and virulently woman-hating.

Why do men who post and repost the list above completely ignore the much longer list of misogynist quotes from famous and infamous men? Because it wouldn't have the effect they are looking for: to get you to believe something without having to think beyond reading a few quotes.

This is the antifeminist misogynists' aim: to get people to believe their lies rather than believe what radical feminists actually do in their activist work. You won't hear much from these MRA trolls about what feminists actually have done to make the world a better, more sane and humane place. They'll only reveal a few quotes by a handful of women with far more reason to be pissed off for men's gross mistreatment of women for millennia. Men's disdain or disrespect for women has no such explanation.

What men who post these quotes can do is post a pack of misinformation quotes, with all manner of typos and distortions. What they cannot do is engage intelligently with the writings of feminists--whole essays and whole books. (Hell, even whole paragraphs!) Sad, but true. The last link, below, is a discussion between an MRA character and a profeminist man, addressing the flawed and distorted thinking and biases of men who don't understand what or why feminists are working for women's human and civil rights. The next to last link is a discussion about the myth of man-hating and the truth about woman-hating.